


[we've gone way too fast for way too long]

by just_about_nothing



Category: Original Work
Genre: Short & Sweet, Writer's Block, Writers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-17
Packaged: 2019-10-11 12:04:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17446634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/just_about_nothing/pseuds/just_about_nothing
Summary: All the stories left a while ago. I miss them and rather wish they'd come back.





	[we've gone way too fast for way too long]

**Author's Note:**

> title from fall out boy's young and menace because mania's the best album of 2018.

All the stories left a while ago. They were, for so long, my constant companions. They were why I talked to myself at night and during the day when I was alone. I needed to warp reality around myself. One day, sometime a number of years past, already, I woke up and found they weren’t there. I found I wasn’t warping _my_ reality anymore but other realities that other people created. 

I miss my stories. They might not have ever been mine as they never caved to my desires for them but they felt like they were part of me. I wrote well, when I could, so well I thought I could sell those stories. Now, when I sit down to write, everything feels cliche. All the emotion is fake and all the characters are made of cardboard. It’s all so forced, in a way nothing, even the worst things I’ve written, were before.

The stories left, and slowly my sense of language is leaving, too. I ramble more, can’t remember words, can’t keep a point. I forgot what the word for hand was yesterday. I’m not very concerned about this, not like I am with the stories, which are irreplaceable in a way nothing else is, but it is strange, to look at your hand and not remember what it’s called. There are times, too, when my grammar seems to have escaped me, and I’ll spell “there” like “their” or “they’re”. Sometimes, I’ll switch “you’re” and “your”. I don’t know what’s happening to me.

I see other people my age, other people that, for a long time, I thought of as my people. The creative class. Those who have something irrepressible to give the world. Artists, writers, actors, makers. I see these people, who for so long, were like me and they are not anymore. Rather, I am not like them. They have kept their paintings, drawings, plays, stories, projects of all sorts, and I have not.

An artist I know who makes a living teaching was asked by her students why she was the only adult they knew who still made creative projects. They asked her when they’d lose the ability to be creative. She didn’t know how to respond in a meaningful way and so she told me. I’ve lost my wordsmithery but I’ve not yet lost my ideas. What did I tell her? Her of the poor and disadvantaged students? I told her I didn’t know because, for me, any creative impulse I’ve had is gone and I doubt I’ll get it back.

The greatest editor I know read what I used to write before I put it on this site. I’m not going to show him this because he’ll look at me with his face crumpled, like he looked for a year after his partner left after twenty years. I might be hugged. I don’t want to bring that look to his face. I don’t want to be hugged or pitied for something I cannot control. 

All the stories left a while ago. I’m still not okay with it, but it doesn’t matter, anyway, because I’ll never be a real writer and I’m too busy to indulge in this.


End file.
